


confessions of a plain jane

by pondscumms



Category: New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Angst, F/F, Female Reader, HAPPY BIRTHDAY BABY GIRL, I LUV YOU MWAH MWAH MWAH, again! arent u surprised, but also WAAAA IM SO SORRY ITS LATE, i didnt think work would b so busy aghhhh ;;, i was in such a rush to finish this omg, ill comb thru it for typoes n shit laaaater, not beta read obv
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-16
Updated: 2019-08-16
Packaged: 2020-09-01 22:15:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20265364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pondscumms/pseuds/pondscumms
Summary: You don't know why you were so attached to her. It could have just been that you were a high school girl with a crush, or maybe that she was constant, like the blinking red light on top of the transmitter tower that you can see out of your bedroom window at night.It's too bad she's not real.





	confessions of a plain jane

**Author's Note:**

> this is a .. slightly less thirsty brand of reader insert? so? i feel like i ended up makin 'reader' into a character, kinda,,,,, like just this introverted gal whos got nothin going for her fjdjfdfudf thatz generic enough rite??? i dont know whatz average so i just stripped her of any hobbies or special traits lmfao
> 
> lmk if this is tagged incorrectly ! im not sure if writing in second person automatically makes it character/reader

You don't notice her until the third episode. There are sixteen of them, after all, and it's not easy to organize all of that information in your head. Names, costumes, talents, voices. If you were a more dedicated fan, you would have memorized the entire cast a day after it came out on Team Danganronpa's website. But, well, you're more of a casual viewer, and you get to know everybody through the eyes of K1-B0, the Ultimate Robot.  
  
The ones you remember the easiest are the ones that stand out. Kiibo's robot body and Gonta's hulking figure are easy to pick out, and they become your landmarks for figuring out what's going on. Iruma's foul mouth, Ouma's annoying antics, and Yonaga's islander strangeness follow close behind. You memorize everyone else soon enough; the character designers have outdone themselves again this season.  
  
Shirogane is the last one. In episode three, she seems to appear out of nowhere, and you have to go back to the promotional posters to confirm that she was always there. For some reason, she doesn't look like a flashy Danganronpa character. She looks like she could be in your class, minus the blue hair. It takes you two more episodes to remember her name, and another still to stop confusing her with Toujou. You're so bad at remembering who she is that you devote extra effort to playing 'spot the Ultimate Cosplayer hiding in the background'.  
  
You suppose that counts as training yourself to pay attention to her.  
  
The more you watch, the more you're convinced that she is different. Shirogane is never at the forefront of the discussion, never a key player, never the one who saves the day in an investigation. She doesn't participate so much as she observes, dragged along by everyone else's current, all but useless in the extreme situation of a mutual killing game. When something frightful happens, she cowers in fear, and as others build plans to stave off the killing for just one more day, all she does is follow along quietly. Her input in the class trials rarely travels beyond a side comment about the gravity of the situation or a reference that nobody understands.  
  
If you're being truthful with yourself, the way she acts is exactly the way you'd act if you were in her place.  
  
If you were a touch more deluded, you would fancy yourself an Akamatsu, optimistic and self sacrificing until the very end. If only your eventual death could be mourned like they mourned hers. But Akamatsu is a fictional character. You are not. Your life is too precious to you and dying is too painful to think about, and you wonder how on earth any human being could possibly do what she did.  
  
You are not one of the Akamatsus or Momotas or even Saiharas of the world. The way they shine on your television screen is uncomfortable; perhaps if they claw their way towards hope even in the face of utter despair, you should be doing a lot more with your easy life as an average student at an average high school. You impulsively decide to join a new club to make yourself feel better, but the experience of awkwardly trying to insert yourself into the literature club halfway through the semester changes your mind. Everyone there already knows each other, and you have nothing interesting to add to their familiar conversations.  
  
Watching Shirogane makes you feel alright again. She doesn't have any rousing speeches to give, and she doesn't slap anyone in the face for being less than they should be. If anything, she would forgive you for being so average. Maybe she'd even take both of your hands in hers and tell you that she knows how you feel, smiling that plain and honest smile.  
  
The thought of it makes you happy.  
  
A week after the second trial of the season, a special segment airs, and you see Saihara talking to a rather excited Shirogane about her love of cosplay. For a moment, she's not plastering herself to the corner to avoid getting caught up in a murder plot, and she looks happy to be here. You can't help but think that the way her eyes sparkle when she talks about the uses of EVA foam is adorable. Every time the camera pans to Saihara, an anxious need wells up inside of you. One more time, you want to see Shirogane's sweet smile one more time.  
  
But before you know it, the conversation shifts, and her pretty features morph into the same sad cast you're used to seeing when something goes awry in the killing game. She talks about how some cosplayers use the characters they cosplay as mere stepping stones on their pathway to fame. You find yourself wishing that you were a seasoned cosplayer too, just so that you could agree with her knowingly, so that you could say something that she's been waiting for another person to say.  
  
It's fine, though. She says she doesn't scorn newbies, and that as long as you enjoy playing your favorite character, you're doing it right. You feel as if she has forgiven you again, but for what, exactly, you're not sure.  
  
You fall asleep that night while scrolling through a cosplay outlet on your phone, scanning over the school uniforms of hundreds of fictional girls who you wish you could be.  
  
Your own school uniform is not cute. It's dowdy, an ugly gray designed specifically to relieve the female figure of any sex appeal. You guess it's a countermeasure to protect you from getting groped on the subway. Standing there on the train with your bookbag, though, you're somehow sure that even if you were wearing something nice, nobody would touch you. Nobody would even look at you. You're just another face in the crowd, another hand wrapped around the metal pole at the end of the seats where the elderly doze on their commute to the countryside.  
  
It pays to be plain.  
  
Nothing is ever different at school, except for the one Danganronpa otaku in your homeroom coming to the conclusion that he _is_ Ouma Kokichi, simply because he's a little over five feet tall. Overnight, his quiet, standoffish personality disappears as he tries to convince everyone that he's always been dishonest and a troublemaker. He sits in the middle of the classroom with an all knowing smirk on his face, and the desk next to you is filled with the disgruntled kendo club member he displaced. The last you see of him before gym class is him goading on a girl who won't pay attention to him, clearly waiting to spring at her with an insult he has prepared beforehand.  
  
You spot him again right before you head home, clutching a purple bruise in the center of his face with blood seeping through the cracks of his fingers. His eyes are puffy from crying, and the way he's slumped over the bench he's sitting on tells you that he's given up trying to tell himself that those are just crocodile tears.  
  
Personally, you forgive him. It's fine to wish you were someone else.  
  
You spend weeks staring at the pleated dress of the heroine of a show you loved when you were thirteen, visiting the webpage where it's being sold so frequently that you're ashamed that you haven't bookmarked it yet. Your parents couldn't care less about what you do with your allowance, but between you and God or whoever is up there watching you, you'd drop dead on the spot if they saw you trying that thing on in the mirror.  
  
Between you and Shirogane, though, you'd die happy if she smiled at you just once and said that she was so, so, so excited to have dragged one more person into cosplay hell.  
  
The outfit arrives on your doorstep at ten in the morning on a Saturday and you spring out of the bushes in your front yard and stuff it into your bookbag before your parents can react to the ringing doorbell. When they open the front door, you grin at them sheepishly, telling them that you locked yourself out.  
  
Upstairs, you lock your door and tear the package open. The dress is flashier than anything you've ever worn, and you pull your curtains _all the way_ shut one more time just to make sure anyone on the other side of the street with a telescope can't even make out a colorful blob in your bedroom window. You barely recognize yourself in the mirror, save for your head, because you have yet to buy the wig. If you block your face out with your hand, there's someone else in the mirror, someone who's ready to kick ass and rescue puppies instead of sitting down to finish her math homework like she's supposed to.  
  
That headless someone could rescue Shirogane Tsumugi from the clutches of the killing game, no problem. That someone would pry the bars of the academy's metal cage apart with her super strength, swoop into the courtyard, and deduce the identity of the mastermind with her super analysis. Then she'd bring the mastermind to an offscreen justice to avoid alienating general audiences, releasing the remaining students, and prance off to ask Shirogane out on a hot date.  
  
You are stupid.  
  
You change out of the dress, carefully wrapping it up in several layers of your old clothes before tucking it away at the bottom of a storage cube in your closet.  
  
Tonight's episode is the conclusion of the third trial. It's every bit as shocking as the spoilery forum posts you accidentally read said it would be, but your biggest takeaway is just that Shirogane survived. You watch her walk out of the trial room on wobbly legs, a look of abject suffering on her face. It tears at your heart. Just a little longer, you want to tell her, hang on just a little longer and you can leave this place. If someone as irrelevant as she is can survive past the third trial, she just might make it until the end. You secretly hope that even Monokuma has forgotten about her.  
  
It seems that most forum posters have forgotten about her, too. Browsing through the new posts on the boards you check every now and then, there's no mention of her save for one brief mention of her in a post about all the free time event segments that run after trials to endear audiences to the remaining participants. At first, you're disappointed that nobody is talking about her, but then it gets in your head that maybe if nobody else notices her, she's all yours.  
  
Rooting for her on your own feels like scrambling into that secret hideout you had in fifth grade, getting away from the ruckus of your classmates participating in an activity that you don't find interesting, getting away from the concerned teachers who say that you don't talk enough in class. You don't need anyone else. All you need is that space behind the bleachers and Shirogane by your side, and the two of you can blend into the wall together.  
  
You don't need to imagine what she would be like as just another student here in your dinky little school, because she already fits right in. Still, though, you wonder...  
  
What was she like before Danganronpa?  
  
The identities of the participants in any current season is a closely guarded secret, because even Team Danganronpa has privacy standards. Even so, there's always going to be a few fans who go too far; for example, you remember that there was an information breach when a crazy fan exposed the previous identity of season 44's Ultimate Survivor. You've also heard sneakier reports of people digging up that information and passing it around in private.  
  
You have neither the connections nor the skills to find out who Shirogane Tsumugi was. All you can do is imagine, and even that is difficult when she's already so close to normal. Was she a little less good at cosplaying? But Team Danganronpa promises to transform you into an entirely new character, right?  
  
The thought is still on your mind the second time you put on that costume, door locked, curtains shut. You draw on your eyeliner with a reference picture of that character pulled up on your phone, makeup wipes ready just in case you need to erase it and start over again. Whoever she was before, it probably doesn't matter. All that matters is that she survives this killing game. You've seen participants do absolutely nothing the whole time and survive until the bitter end; you can only hope that it'll be the same for her.  
  
You line your lips, still absorbed in your thoughts. If she lives, maybe she'll be at Comiket next year. If she lives, maybe you can meet her there, however briefly. Maybe you can get a picture of you and her together.  
  
Something creeps into your mind slowly, and you shake your head in belated embarrassment when you realize what you're thinking about. No. You can't go out in public wearing this shitty store bought costume to meet the Ultimate Cosplayer, even though she's so kind to beginners. But the thought of it...  
  
This is the tricky thing about real fiction. A drawn character can be replicated in any number of forms, including cosplay, and none of them will have the gravity of the original. But the killing game is populated by real bodies, who, if they live to escape into the real world, become real people. The very concept of meeting the real Shirogane Tsumugi is absurd, but you can't help wanting it with every fiber of your being.  
  
The other survivors might be popular ones. The average number per season seems to be three; could you hope for Ouma and Saihara to pull through to the end and siphon away the crowds that would surely gather around Shirogane despite her plainness? It looks possible at this point. Maybe you can work in more than just a handshake, a photo, and a signature. If you're lucky, maybe she'll even remember you. The sudden smile on your face causes your lip gloss to travel onto your chin.  
  
You still look out of place in that flashy costume, but you're beginning to believe that all you need to fix that is a wig.  
  
Shirogane survives chapters four and five. Suddenly, there's a jump in speculation about her all over the internet, and you hear some of your nerdier classmates whispering about her behind you in homeroom. Hearing her name from a few desks away makes your heart leap out of your chest. It's almost as if they're gossiping about a girl in another class, maybe the one in the room on the opposite side of the hallway.  
  
If only.  
  
You don't know how to feel about the newest theory. She can't be, right? Your beloved Tsumugi can't be the mastermind. It's impossible to imagine an evil expression on her delicate face. At least, that's what you think, until you try it yourself. It's totally out of character, that picture of her in your head, and you feel almost unfaithful for being fascinated with it. A completely different side of her that you've never seen surfaces in the scattered posts you read about her. She's cruel but not violent, preferring to sit back and watch as everyone else kills each other. She acts from the shadows, pushing at the cast through flashback lights but never doing any of the dirty work in person.  
  
You don't want her to be the mastermind. In all 52 previous seasons, the mastermind has only survived a handful of times, and the sheer backlash from the audience after any season where the ringleader survives is hell to live through. Whether she lives or dies, she'll be torn to shreds. You've gone this long without seeing her corpse on the floor with that trademark neon pink blood pooling underneath it and you want this to be over with already.  
  
The two wigs you're choosing between are almost identical, but one is more expensive, with nicer material. You count up your allowance at the end of the week and settle on the cheaper one.  
  
You leave a stream of today's episode running on your laptop as you style the wig. The final trial is going to take a while; it's a Danganronpa tradition for it to drag on and on, weaving through plot twists and new discoveries about dead people before coming to a searing finish. This season's twist is shaping up to be a retrial of a previous murder, something that has your favorite discussion boards going up in flames. You resist the urge to check them every three seconds, your fingers awkwardly working sections of fake hair through a set of rollers.  
  
Hang on just a little longer, Tsumugi.  
  
By the start of the first ad break, you've forgotten about the wig. You're pacing frantically back and forth across the carpet, and if there was enough room in your thoughts right now for a complaint, you'd be upset that there's practically no space in this claustrophobic nest of laundry and trash for you to walk around in. You trip over your bookbag for the umpteenth time and you don't even notice, your nerves shot from the panic of knowing what must be about to happen.  
  
Danganronpa 53 comes back on. Saihara corners her. You feel sick.  
  
There's nothing to say about what happens after that except that you can't sleep that night. All you can do is lie in bed for a few sickly minutes before your legs propel you towards your laptop and you spend another five hours reading through thousands of forum posts about a girl nobody ever talked about before, your stomach turning and your palms sweating.  
  
They all hate her. They're not going to miss her. They want her dead.  
  
It's only you now, only you by her side under the bleachers, hiding from the mob. You shouldn't be there. You shouldn't still love her; you should feel betrayed, furious.  
  
Poor Tsumugi.  
  
The next episode isn't until a week later. On Sunday, you stumble through your daily routine like a zombie. Your parents ask if you're alright. On Monday, you almost jump into the conversation you overhear about Tsumugi, but a sudden dizzy spell sits you back down in your chair. On Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, you occupy yourself with posting on those forums, nearly running into people countless times because your eyes are glued to your phone. On Saturday, you skip dinner, too nauseous to eat before the next episode. Your mother frowns as you run upstairs and lock yourself in your room again.  
  
You manage to fall asleep this time, but your dreams are so feverish and jumbled that you wake up disoriented at four in the morning.  
  
Why did this have to happen?  
  
You read forum posts until the very first hints of sunlight start showing up over the horizon. When the sky turns from black to gray, you set your phone aside and cry into your pillow.  
  
You just want your Tsumugi back.  
  
You're sure they're going to kill her, and you're sure you're going to watch it, no matter how awful it makes you feel. Perhaps you should be enjoying your time right now, knowing that she's still alive in the same world as you for a precious few more days.  
  
She once seemed so real and so close that you could almost touch her; now the distance between you and Team Danganronpa's filming facilities is no less than a lightyear, an impossible distance to travel before she's gone forever.  
  
Next Saturday, she dies without ceremony. It's the plainest death you've ever seen on Danganronpa; no elaborate machinery, no violent rituals, nothing to do with her talent as a cosplayer. Just her disappointed frown as she waves goodbye to the world, and a falling rock.  
  
Your mother says that you've been losing weight and that you have dark circles under your eyes.  
  
Season 53 of Danganronpa is over. And so is Danganronpa itself, you guess, but that doesn't matter to you as much as it matters to the angry forumgoers who flood your phone with notifications. You spend most of your time wrapped up in a cocoon of blankets, listless in your sheets.  
  
Across from you in your room is a styrofoam mannequin head, the halfway styled wig still sitting on top of it where you forgot it at the start of the last trial. It's a tiring sight. When your mom says that you need to start coming out of your room because she's really, really concerned about you and that she would like you to let her in for a talk, you force out a sluggish reply and drag yourself out of bed.  
  
You stow the mannequin head away in your bathroom cupboard, and toss the wig in beside the rest of your costume at the bottom of your closet.  
  
It feels like burying a dead body.  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> im really sad that tsumugi-chan will never find my questionably illustrated tsumugi shirogane body pillow and suffocate me with it


End file.
